With the 4.2 changes Mew indicates that it's still not worth it to FB above 25% until you've got 4pT12. That doesn't really change; the damage for FB is still nto enough to counterbalance the loss of potential rip time or SR. In terms of stats, didn't see the evaluation but it doesn't change significantly right now. With higher level gear (all 378 and some 391) I suspect that you'll start seeing mastery getting neck and neck with crit and haste. And of course crit has higher value with berserk with the 4p bonus.

Also, the glyph of TF is essentially done for with the glyph of berserk change, but that's obvious. What's interesting is that with the glyph of berserk and the 4p it's reasonable to get close to 20% berserk uptime, which is kinda nuts.

felhoof wrote:With the 4.2 changes Mew indicates that it's still not worth it to FB above 25% until you've got 4pT12. That doesn't really change; the damage for FB is still nto enough to counterbalance the loss of potential rip time or SR. In terms of stats, didn't see the evaluation but it doesn't change significantly right now. With higher level gear (all 378 and some 391) I suspect that you'll start seeing mastery getting neck and neck with crit and haste. And of course crit has higher value with berserk with the 4p bonus.

Also, the glyph of TF is essentially done for with the glyph of berserk change, but that's obvious. What's interesting is that with the glyph of berserk and the 4p it's reasonable to get close to 20% berserk uptime, which is kinda nuts.

Well wait, I thought SR was kinda like, "worthless" (in the sense it only contributes to white damage)? I mean, with the FB changes, it wouldn't go back to more of a pre 4.1 rotation of sorts? Wtih as much spare CPs as we have now, I really find it hard to believe it's still not worth using FB and it's better to just sit on CP, especially since SR has such a long duration anyways and Rip is always prioritized first as well...then again, I don't know the math, so maybe it is better to keep wasting CP.

You can get a glimpse. Kindof. New 4.2 compliant MeW is out. Just get out some paper and right down stats from gear allready previewed. Of course this wont help you know if you are going to catch that mage or not.

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Preliminary DPS change with my gear (a little outdated, just used my old save file, but should still be equally valid):I adjusted the unbuffed attack power down by 184 which I believe is correct (technically I didn't switch the glove enchant, but that's going to be a fairly minor change, like <20 DPS).

Haste actually went down a bit which is odd, I expected it to go up; I guess due to less damage coming from auto attacks?. Mastery down a smidge. Hit/Expertise down a smidge (they tend to follow haste but to a lesser degree). Fairly large scaling change with primary stats though (Agility +5% and Melee DPS +8%) so the Strength nerf will be felt less as tiers go up but someone in say Blue gear that has access to the Str/Agi buff might actually be doing less damage post patch (but someone doing stuff in blue gear isn't likely to have guaranteed access to the Str/Agi buff anyhow). Then again we were OP in blue relative to everyone else so that's an ok change anyhow.

Make sure you do at least 100,000 or it won't really give you an accurate reading. They jump all over the place any less than that really. A million is really just too long, but 100k seems to do ok.

I did one in my current gear, mostly 372 gear and I gain about 1k dps. Not a lot, but meh, will take what I can get. Stat values didn't move a whole lot, mastery went down a tiny bit and everything else went up some, nothing big.

One interesting thing I did though was run my current stats but having 2 and 4pc t12, at this point, Haste becomes the top secondary stat, followed by hit, expertise, crit then mastery bringing up the rear. It's kind of interesting. At this rate, unless anything else changes, Haste is going to be our top secondary stat in 4.2 with mastery likely being the lowest. Kind of funny.

Are "sets" of Mew RSV's directly comparable (ie based on some common anchor value)? I thought the values were only "relative" to the values within the set, not from set to set. In other words, can you really make "less than/greater than" comparisons between a set of 4.1 and 4.2 Mew RSV's? What is the common baseline stat that the sets are based on to keep them relative to each other?

In the past I think Rawr's RSV's were all based off the value of 1 AP = 1.00, making those RSV's comparable from set to set, but Mew lists AP as its own free floating value so I'm confused - is there some other value I'm missing holding them together?

cynrh wrote:Are "sets" of Mew RSV's directly comparable (ie based on some common anchor value)? I thought the values were only "relative" to the values within the set, not from set to set. In other words, can you really make "less than/greater than" comparisons between a set of 4.1 and 4.2 Mew RSV's? What is the common baseline stat that the sets are based on to keep them relative to each other?

In the past I think Rawr's RSV's were all based off the value of 1 AP = 1.00, making those RSV's comparable from set to set, but Mew lists AP as its own free floating value so I'm confused - is there some other value I'm missing holding them together?

Eh, kind of. Mew's RSV are based off of how much of a DPS gain you get from 1(?) of the corresponding stat (ie 1 agility ~= 3 DPS). So in that sense they are comparable across multiple runs. The problem with this method becomes when you have an increase in DPS, all the stats get "better" (generally speaking, some scale better than others obviously). That's easy enough to fix though, I can make everything relative to AP.

At first glance one might think (including myself) well wtf, everything went down (except melee DPS) doesn't that mean scaling went down? No, it means attack power scaling went UP relative to everything else (which is what I concluded in my first post). Basically, Agility will be even more of a goto stat than it was before. To get a true comparison as to which way every stat went, we'd probably have to do this with every stat but I don't feel like futzing with the calculator that much. Overall not a major change. I expected it honestly to have more effect on mastery than it did. *shrug*

P.S. I think the DPS method is much better than the AP method for RSV cause the DPS is a constant, AP's value relative to everything else is not.

Not really a change to damage since this glyph was never used. If it takes in to account the base energy cost, then that is always at least 2% max health each time we bite, regardless of combo points used. 5% heal if we use all 50 energy (base cost + the extra 25 energy conversion).

ShmooDude wrote:Eh, kind of. Mew's RSV are based off of how much of a DPS gain you get from 1(?) of the corresponding stat (ie 1 agility ~= 3 DPS). So in that sense they are comparable across multiple runs. The problem with this method becomes when you have an increase in DPS, all the stats get "better" (generally speaking, some scale better than others obviously).

The problem with Mew's RSvs is that they only test out 100 stat points in any direction. If you move your gear from one extreme to another (for example high haste, low crit, vs. high crit low haste vs. hit/expertise capped) the RSVs reported will be quite different.

For example in Tangedyn's blog post about RSVs, crit was more valuable in the gear setup that had high haste and haste was more valuable in the gear setup that had high crit. The high crit setup had the highest overall dps results. Nothing about the RSV values would have told you that the crit setup would test out the best, and even that is gear dependent since at different gear levels, I have seen balanced setups test out better (not to mention hit/exp move higher when I test Atramedes).

If we simply want to know whether or not the current 4.02 changes will increase our dps, then run a comparison across several gear sets with different reforging schemes and different fight scenarios and compare the overall dps value. fortunately the confidence intervals on straight dps calculations is much higher in Mew so 10k iterations is plenty for that purpose.

As for whether or not haste will be better at a given gear level - you are better off comparing the overall dps of different reforging schemes across different fights than looking at the RSVs.

Glyph of Ferocious Bite has been redesigned. It now causes Ferocious Bite to heal the caster for 1% of maximum health for each 10 energy used.

Almost sounds like a (very) weak attempt to give it a Recuperate feel for pvp...oh well.

Also looks like the tier shoulders are now displaying properly...all I can say is, thank whatever Azeroth god you like that we have a fire cat form to look forward to instead of this sorta lame tier12 stuff.

"“The secondary stats are so close in value now that you you can pretty much choose any combination of crit/haste/exp/hit without significantly impacting your dps.” Bottom line – RSV calculations may be valuable to theoreticians, but do not use them as a guide for how to reforge your gear. As always, your time will be much better spent focusing on the fight mechanics and your rotation."

As you state, spending time perfecting rotation and fight mechanics will have a lot more payoff than looking at stat combinations.

The irony is that it's taken along time and a lot of analysis by you guys to reach this conclusion, however it is a valuable conclusion I think, for which I am greatful. I for one am happier knowing I can stack hit/exp without it seriously impacting my dps.... or crit if I feel that way (who doesn't like lots of crits). So long as mastery is not sacrificed of course.

Its certainly preferable to the conclusion that unless you spend hours running mew sims your dps will suck.

Most of us run sims likely out of boredom and desire to maximize wherever we can. Me and the other feral in my guild run a lot of sims and talk about RSVs all the time. Even though when it comes down to it, no matter how we reforge, the tank moving the boss and causing you to miss a single shred or refresh that SotP, or letting something else fall off will result in much more dps increase than reforging to a different stat. It's pretty funny really.

But between raids, there isn't a lot else to do right now =P.

I think sometimes too we hope that by running sims we will somehow find some hidden secret that will cause our DPS to catch those of other classes.

Even mastery is not particularly sacrosanct anymore. Qbear has been running the last week with both hit and exp capped and has had some of his highest dps performances to date. The only thing holding him back right now is that he has not bribed any of his locks to give him DI, much less bribing a rogue for ToT and/or a DK for UF.

With the increased value of our direct damage attacks, bleeds will be doing less damage, which will level the secondary stats even more.

Now if we can just get people to talk in total dps numbers rather than RSVs life will be good. Perhaps we can agree on a common set of profiles and a common set of fights to test against that will give us good coverage. Then we will all be speaking the same language.

How about a high crit set, a high haste set, a balanced set, and a set with hit and expertise maxed? Based on BiS gear (372+sinestra belt with UW/cyclone)?

For fights, there is the tried and true Patch style, but we should also test Atramedes. Unfortunately we don't have a good way to simulate add fights right now. Fight lengths also matter - especially with the changes to extend Berserk as clipping it is more of a concern.2

I think sometimes too we hope that by running sims we will somehow find some hidden secret that will cause our DPS to catch those of other classes.

Well, historically this HAS been true. This was how arpen was found to be so amazing for ferals - and what to do when you could soft-cap it and hard cap it and what the differentials were when you COULDN'T do those things.

Similarly, mastery was shown to be amazing early on in Cata; it's only come this far via nerfs and whatnot that we do have this kind of balance.

Stats in general are pretty boring compared to prior expansions.

It's nice to hear the hit/exp thing is working out for Qbear. I think that fight mechanics will likely dictate that, but it's good to see.

Yeah for all those who haven't been following the fluiddruid vids (which i don't blame you I really need to work on being more amp'd up in discussing them) I've been running hit/exp capped for the past week to test my numbers against myself as I was previously using Mew to reforge to gain max damaged based on how the RSV dictated me to do so.

Of course its a bit flawed since so many random factors can happen in a fight that help increase or decrease your overall dps; however, I gained 5 new WoL's ranked parses using hit/exp caps. I mention the rankings not to brag, but to show that being hit/exp capped is very competitive as Leaf mentioned to rank using what is known to be a less dps set up while not receiving things like tot's, di's, uf's goes along way in showing just how close our secondary stats have become.

For anyone interested in trying it out there are some noticeable differences. Mostly energy generation feels a lot slower. I find personally there are far less times I'm sitting at 5 cps and simply spamming shred. Of course it's amazing for the last second refreshes on the 100's of things we have to keep up. Later I'm hold Leaf down until he finds out on paper just how much lower dps it truly is using his different fight simulator methods.

As for 4.2 a glyph that will heal me for 2.5% of my health in execute phase? Yes plz!

Qbear wrote:As for 4.2 a glyph that will heal me for 2.5% of my health in execute phase? Yes plz!

Not too impressed with it personally. Even at its max (5%) that's never going to break a 10k heal anytime soon (to heal 10k that'd require 200k health). Its basically a semi-controllable LotP heal and we know how hard those hit for... It MIGHT save your life on Chimaeron with the help of some other heals, but Healing Touch is better for that.

Yeah, sure its "free" but only because we don't have anything worthwhile to put in our Major glyphs besides Feral Charge and Rebirth (I've actually been using Barkskin for the crit reduction cause I actually do a fair amount of emergency tanking if we lost a tank on an attempt).

Personally I think it needs to heal for a lot more before its considered useful.

Oh I agree on the fact that the heal isn't amazing by any stretch of the mind. However, I've been running around maul glyph cause well whats it matter? Haha I'll take the free heal already got my dust of disappearance waiting.